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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, many of the soldiers who are involved - however peripherally - in reports of alleged UFO activity are highly trained and disciplined personnel with their heads screwed on straight. No amount of sheer straightlaced-ness makes the human eye any less of an unreliable tool or makes the brain on the backend run a less unreliable compression codec to stabilize the picture. The very same kind of highly trained, highly disciplined personnel are responsible for goofs like launching nuclear bomb-equipped bombers from an airbase and very nearly starting World War III because they mistook a black bear on the periphery of an airbase for a human intruder or forgot to swap a training tape out of a NORAD defense computer and almost convinced the Strategic Air Command that World War III had begun. Mr. Halt saw something... but given that the Halt memo was never classified, the supporting documentation indicates only the most cursory follow-up investigation was made, and a host of eyewitness statements not only failed to corroborate his account but outright refuted it with a thoroughly mundane explanation, it seems unlikely that he saw anything that was of extraterrestrial or even unusual origin. The general consensus among eyewitnesses and the locals is that Mr. Halt saw the Orfordness lighthouse beacon distorted by prevailing conditions. It's only natural that he wouldn't be punished for an honest mistake, since he acted in the name of preserving the security of the base to which he was assigned. Like so many of these incidents, the lack of evidence to support claims of a coverup of UFO activity is itself taken as evidence of the efficacy of said coverup... which implies a belief that our governments are far, FAR more capable than they can be demonstrated to be when it comes to keeping secrets. Unless we've got a real world verison of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged out there trolling rednecks for fun, odds are any visiting extraterrestrials (if they do in fact visit us at all) are substantially more discreet than the kind of nonsense that makes up the typical UFO report. The mundane explanation is pretty much invariably the right one. When or if we do finally confirm the existence of extraterrestrials, it'll be because we've found some mundane proof... like Glorg'nax locking himself out of the saucer and politely trying to explain his predicament to parking enforcement in the hopes of not getting a ticket. This garish nonsense with every alleged alien spacecraft being covered in more flashing lights than the average Star Trek prop and shining like a spotlight is only explainable as alien activity if Earth is somehow a hotspot for showing off riced out starships with the tacky road effects and spinning rims.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    There is, to be fair, at least a modest amount of evidence to indicate that Academy and Antarctic were not giving Robotech their A-game... as it similarly true for Titan Comics.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The whole point of those previous reporting activities was to brief politicians about it. The military would occasionally deny this kind of reporting activity was going on, but usually only if they were covering up for an ongoing secret project that kept getting reported like the Project Mogul, Project Moby Dick, and Project Genetrix high-altitude balloon programs that were used for detecting Soviet nuclear tests or conducting clandestine photography of Soviet territory. (The infamous Roswell "UFO" debris is actually a Project Mogul nuclear test detection balloon's radar reflector.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, at least the wine'll be top-notch. If you go on Memory Beta and search "relaunch novels timeline", you'll get a LONG timeline that shows how they all fit together chronologically... except for the ENT relaunch, which is set like 200 years before all of them. You didn't miss much, it's basically Star Trek Nemesis 2.0... literally the same crap about a macguffin weapon that causes people to rapidly decay on a subatomic level (because quarks totally know if they're part of organic matter, right?) being used by a Federation-hating human xenophobe to destroy Earth. If you like dirtbikes and the Beastie Boys, it might be slightly better than Nemesis. Otherwise, they're both eminently skippable.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The poster the hack is standing in front of is a blown up copy of one of the covers from the aforementioned "From the Stars" miniseries where the VF-X-4 was used. Well, that too... but, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty likely that the rampant copyright infringement and tracing was a significant factor in Harmony Gold revoking Academy Comics's license in 1996 and Antarctic Press's license in 1998. Some of it, in all fairness, could probably be attributed to Harmony Gold not really making it clear what their license was actually covering... since a lot of the infringement was from Macross sequels. Probably the lowest point was the promotional tie-in comic for the vaporware Robotech: Crystal Dreams video game for the Nintendo 64. That black and white comic was about 80% tracing, and almost entirely from DYRL?. Antarctic presided over that fiasco, but almost all of their comics infringed on at least one copyright. Usually more than one. (Amusingly, I had forgotten that Robotech Academy was originally the working title for Robotech: Crystal Dreams... how ironic they BOTH became vaporware.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Between this and Sonic the Hedgehog, 2019 seems to have bought a condo in the Uncanny Valley. This looks as bad, if not worse, than Mike Myers as The Cat in the Hat.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That's not anything new... Robotech's comic licensees have been tracing from Macross artbooks and outright stealing characters, mechanical designs, and entire plots from other anime (incl. Macross sequels) since the late 80's. My personal favorite example is a comic called Robotech: Wings of Gibraltar in which every VF-1 is traced from the Gold Book, the "new" VF featured in the story is basically a badly drawn VF-19F, and the scientist at the top secret facility that created it is literally Brent Spiner's character from Independence Day, traced from stills from that film so he looks completely different from every other character in the comic. (This kind of copyright infringement was so commonplace in Robotech's old comics that Harmony Gold decided to decanonize them all and avoid reprinting or referencing them to avoid legal troubles down the road, and even admitted they'd f'ed up royally by not exercising oversight over what their licensees had been doing.) The VF-X-4... they can't legally use the VF-4. It's one of those things the Robotech fandom has been obsessing over for decades. It only shows up as a model, so naturally they surrounded it with a whirlwind of unfounded speculation until Tommy Yune had it appear in the "From the Stars" miniseries back in ~2001. Not being a mechanical designer, he dodged the question of making it transform by having it encounter mechanical issues during its brief sortie. Robotech didn't finally design its own transformation for the VF-X-4 until a few years ago with the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter, where it was a stretch goal reward.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... but guys look Doomcock wouldn't be funny if they were pleased. The entertainment value comes from them being such massive curmudgeons. As Dr. Bashir would have it: "Nothing makes them happy! They are dedicated to being unhappy and to spreading that unhappiness wherever they go! They are the ambassadors of unhappy!" Well, yeah... there's no way a Star Trek movie was going to kill a main character without setting the stage for a potential Search for Spock-style return in a future film. They just never closed the loop on it because Nemesis ended up being the last TNG movie and the last proper Star Trek film... so it wasn't until Cold Equations (in the novelverse) or STO's B4 Matrix event that Data got brought back to life YEARS after he "died". (Insurrection and Nemesis were kind of a big comedown, going from beating a mad doctor and Klingon renegades and then the Borg Queen herself to beating up a dying man as interpreted by Salvador Dali and then Picard losing a fistfight to his own clone wearing a rainbow-oil pleather onesie. If they'd done another one, it would've been two hours of Picard arguing with a dozy rent-a-cop about validating the parking for his shuttle.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    It definitely takes on a more surreal tone, especially with the OP "Crazy Noisy Bizarre Town"... which borders on being a dance OP even before being remixed into an EDM version after a dozen or so episodes. Jojo was already over-the-top, but it seems to have totally stopped taking itself even a little seriously. Kinda vaulted into straight-up weird when I hit that two-episode bit with... Also, is it just me, or does Crazy Diamond look suspiciously like a pink and platinum version of The World?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... didn't see that coming. Still finding Magical Sempai weirdly enjoyable. It's got a fair bit of fanservice, but it doesn't feel like it's an end unto itself the way it did in Ao-chan Can't Study, so it doesn't feel as objectionable. There's a certain sympathetic appeal in watching that poor, put-upon assistant try to keep the titular character in line (and fail) and watching her occasional schemes to cheat backfire horribly. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable still doesn't feel quite right to me. I think it's the change in art style from Stardust Crusaders, Jotaro just doesn't look right without being ridiculously shredded. That and the weird texture on Josuke's pompadour and a few of the flattops makes them look like they're wearing cartoon steaks on their heads.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's more or less treated as being its own separate timeline... which is to say, not canon. They were also more or less treating Bad Reboot's kickoff to Star Trek '09 as a separate timeline along with the relaunch novels. Really, I think it's reasonably fair to call the J.J. Abrams movies a failure. They generated very little licensing - scarcely more than what Star Trek: Discovery managed - and their lackluster performance at the box office meant that the studio was arguably losing money on them internationally. Most fans didn't like them, and the audience that did pay for tickets didn't stick around. Is it unfair to declare a project a failure when the investors say "this is a bad investment, I'm out" and bail on it?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's so much cross-pollination between them that it wouldn't be a stretch to say the TNG, DS9, and VOY relaunches feel like a single series. IMO, the Enterprise relaunch is pretty strong once you get past the parts about... The Romulan War duology is excellent, if rather dark, and the whole The Rise of the Federation arc currently in progress has been pretty great as well. The The Next Generation relaunch is definitely much better in its standalone installments than its serialized ones. I would consider the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy that wrapped up the Borg business to be the overall low point, but there are some pretty fine moments as well. The Deep Space Nine relaunch has some really excellent moments when it's doing its own thing, but it often gets bogged down in how many members of its cast ended up as figures of religious significance. Lots of really great high concept sci-fi adventure and astropolitical intrigue occasionally broken up by waxing lyrical about religion. Like the TV series, some of the best stories are the ones focusing on the alien cast members like Quark or Garak... especially Garak. The Voyager relaunch is like pulling teeth. It's bad. REALLY bad. The worst of the lot is Star Trek: Titan, though.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Give it time... folks are so keyed up to see the return of familiar characters like Jean-Luc Picard, Plenty of Two Seven of Nine, and Data that they've forgotten Star Trek: Picard is developed, produced, written, directed, filmed, and edited by the same Bad Reboot clown college responsible for the Star Trek: Discovery series they so thoroughly loathed. This is what CBS and Bad Reboot were counting on to sell the series in its first season, or at least its first few episodes. Trot out familiar characters from parts of Trek the fans don't hate and rely on that borrowed gloss from better shows to keep the Trekkies from noticing any signs of the franchise's Kurtzmanitis infection going septic. Not a lot of original thought on display, IMO... this wouldn't even be the first time Bad Reboot's bad actors toyed with the notion of un-killing Data. They did the same in the prequel comic they did to set up the Kelvin-verse, in which Data's copied mind takes over B4's body and he goes on to become captain of the Enterprise-E. Kind of a slam dunk there for the fans, given that killing Data off back in Nemesis was so wildly unpopular that all three extant Star Trek continuities persisting after the film undid it right away. I can't say I'm all that psyched for Seven of Nine either. She had some good episodes in late Voyager, but she was meant mainly to arrest a ratings plummet by being more decorative than other women on the cast and became a bit of a black hole swallowing up plots later on, with a lot of them feeling REALLY forced like her relationship with wooden indian Chakotay. While it lasts, I suppose... For my part, I'm going to keep my expectations as low as possible in the hopes that I'll be pleasantly surprised for once. I'd really like to be wrong, and for Star Trek to be good again. The Star Trek relaunch novels are one of the three coordinated efforts to keep Star Trek going after Nemesis spun in... the other two being Star Trek Online and the J.J. Abrams reboot trilogy flop. They're essentially an Expanded Universe line of novels that pick up after the ends of their respective shows ("relaunching" those storylines) and continue forward, managed by a single creative team as a coordinated shared universe development. There are a few TOS side stories, but the relaunch novel-verse focuses on the relaunched stories of Star Trek: the Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    and I am 2000% done. No thank you. Yeah, the only thing they could think of to add some appeal to Picard was to - hey hey - bring back the Borg. It was a bad idea when the Star Trek relaunch novelverse did it, and time has not sweetened the idea.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    The plot doesn't make any sense anyway... so what can they possibly spoil? It's almost Dadaist in its complete devotion to being nonsense.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    No, I think he was reading it right... why would Sony put its money behind a project that Harmony Gold had such little confidence in that it refused to invest its own money in it? For an allegedly-professional outfit that claims its product was a genre- and industry-defining universally-celebrated masterpiece it's not exactly congruous for them to be begging fans, hat in hand, for money on a crowdfunding platform meant for launching indie projects.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    A fair amount of the new product announcements looked like Happy Meal toys rather than the expensive collectibles they're going to be priced as... "Dear Harmony Gold, please prove that you actually own something of the IP you sold us a license to. Sincerely, Sony Pictures." I can just imagine the furor going on at Harmony Gold over that one... this feels less like Sony asking for concept materials than it does Sony asking Harmony Gold to prove that this sh*t-awful brand hasn't been six feet under for over a decade now. ... even evil corporations have standards.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... is it even possible to spoil a completely incoherent story? What Titan Comics did with this series is the literary equivalent of a game of Calvinball.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    He's gone independent a bunch of times out of frustration with the mainstream publishers, but AFAIK this is his first actual retirement. His Rasputin-esque hair and beard always seemed like their own character to me, I wonder if they'll retire too or just jump to a new host.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Only for merchandise. Harmony Gold sought and obtained an addendum to its existing license agreement with Tatsunoko Production for the purpose of acquiring the merchandising rights (outside Japan) to Macross: Do You Remember Love? c.2001 as part of the company's efforts to halt, or at least restrict, US imports of Japanese Macross toys to protect their then-new licensee Toynami and its nascent Masterpiece Collection and Super-Poseable toy lines for Robotech. They don't have the distribution rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and they don't have any rights to Macross: Flash Back 2012 or the Macross IP and thus wouldn't be able to use Megaroad-01 under any circumstances. Besides the fact that HG didn't license the merchandising rights to DYRL? until 15 years after Robotech II: the Sentinels was cancelled, Harmony Gold were always aware they they could not legally use Macross designs in new animated or live action works and couldn't afford to hire the Macross staff to create new designs for them either. That inability to use Macross designs was the reason Robotech II: the Sentinels redesigned all the surviving characters and used a mixture of original mechanical designs created by Tatsunoko Production and the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA designs Tatsunoko owned free and clear. The SDF-3 seen in the Sentinels animation that was completed before it was cancelled isn't the warship's true appearance, it's a faux-Zentradi veneer built around the outer hull of the SDF-3 to disguise it as a Zentradi ship in the hopes it'd pass for friendly under a cursory inspection and approach the Robotech Masters homeworld unmolested. The SDF-3 is never shown without its Zentradi camouflage shell until after her bow gets shot off and she gets rebuilt with a MOSPEADA aesthetic in the prequel comic for Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. Yeah, that's the one. Even Robotech fans frequently likened the ship's appearance to a turd.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Fortunately KyoAni has more than one studio facility... but what a disaster for the industry, losing so many talented animators and support staff. A lot of their stuff wasn't really my cup of tea, but the quality of their work was pretty consistently amazing. Been a weird week for industry news too... a couple days back I saw an article from an animator working on Symphogear XV trying to argue that a transformation sequence involving pole dancing totally wasn't "sleazy" or exploitative. From what he described, the staff pretty clearly tried to make it less sleazy, but that isn't the same thing as not being sleazy at all. (It's probably easier to give it a pass in Gainax's Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt since that whole show was unapologetically trying to push the limits of good - or bad - taste.) Black Lagoon's apparently getting a spinoff manga about Sawyer, the "cleaner" who handles body disposal for the various toughs in Roanapur. I'm still waiting and hoping they'll do more with the animation, since they basically stopped at the El Baile de la Muerte story arc's conclusion. A few episodes into Magical Sempai and it's every bit as one-note as Ao-chan Can't Study!, but I'd say it's more entertaining by far since the running gags are more your typical boke and tsukkomi routine with the assistant as the straight man instead of being focused on maximum lewdness.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    What a disaster. Kyoto Animation has an impressive filmography of really beautiful animation work, the loss and injury of so many talented animators and support staff is a genuine tragedy for the anime industry. I don't think the police have officially commented on the culprit's motive yet.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well c'mon, if you open Pandora's Box you have to cope with the evils it contains.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I've got multiple print copies of FANKY's whole Macross doujinshi series, but I've done very little scanning since the translators here tend to avoid distributing scans for various reasons. lol, I know precisely the scan you mean. It's a surprisingly good source for (worksafe) anime-themed periodicals too even if the site itself isn't safe for work. I hadn't seen any scans in circulation of the first fleet book until you posted that, and I've seen nothing for the 3rd fleet book and the first book in the series.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's a somewhat hard-to-come-by limited printing doujinshi, and I don't believe it's been scanned by anyone thus far. Copies occasionally turn up on Mandarake or Yahoo Japan auctions. I can try to use Office Lens to scan the relevant pages this weekend. Right now my study's all torn up while the carpets are being replaced, so I can't get to the bookshelves.
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